Journalists have rights, just like everybody else

In the end, because of technology and social media, everyone is effectively a “journalist.” Which all the more becomes important for everyone to remember that we have rights because we have responsibilities.

Probably it’s intersectionality. Or identity politics. Or the glorification of victimhood. Whatever the cause, everyone nowadays seems to demand preferential treatment. Of course, it’s never stated that way. Usually, it’s called as a plea for “rights.”

From LGBT activists to the Bangsamoro, special laws are urged, all providing for a specific set of “rights” exclusive to them alone.

Never mind that, in our constitutional system, human rights have been well provided for — for all people — under our Constitution’s Article III, various other constitutional provisions, and our adoption of international law as part of the laws of the land.

Anyway, even journalists are now making the same clamor.

Yet the Constitution’s relevant provision, Article III.4, is quite succinct: “No law shall be passed abridging the freedom of speech, of expression, or of the press …”

So it’s baffling why this is news to some people: “freedom of the press” is not exclusive for journalists. That constitutional right was never meant to carve out a special privilege for those working formally as part of a registered news organization.

For context, let’s remember the text of the US Constitution’s First Amendment (from where we essentially got our Articles III.4 and III.5): “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; ...”

From the foregoing, as UCLA School of Law’s Eugene Volokh points out, it’s clear that the freedom was for “‘every citizen’ to use the press-as-technology, and not a freedom belonging to the press as-industry.”

Furthermore, “Justice Scalia pointed out in Citizens United, the shared words ‘freedom of’ in the phrase the ‘freedom of speech, or of the press’ are most reasonably understood as playing the same role for both ‘speech’ and ‘press.’ The ‘freedom of speech’ is freedom to engage in an activity, much like ‘freedom of movement’